What You Need To Know About Amazon SimpleDB — Well after being under NDA for so long, I'm glad to be able to say that Amazon SimpleDB has gone into limited beta. Congratulations to everyone on the SDS / SimpleDB team; their several years of work on SimpleDB (formerly called SDS) is a brilliant piece of engineering.

Amazon Takes on Oracle and IBM With SimpleDB — Companies can now go ahead and fire their expensive database administrators—those engineers who keep the Oracle or IBM databases humming. Amazon has just added an enterprise-class database called SimpleDB to its suite of cloud-based IT infrastructure …

A Year Later, the Same Scene: Long Lines for the Elusive Wii — SAN FRANCISCO — Linda Beattie is trying desperately to pay Nintendo $250, but the company is not cooperating. — Two weeks ago, Ms. Beattie went to a video game retailer in the Bay Area in search of a Wii, Nintendo's intensely popular video game machine.

Nintendo, GameStop address Wii shortage — The Nintendo Wii launched more than a year ago, and the system is still incredibly hard to find. This long after the system started shipping, people are still camping in front of stores as soon as they hear about new shipments.

Googlepedia — Just to underscore the impetus behind the launch of Googlepedia - er, Knol - I went back to rerun a test I first ran over a year ago to see how high Wikipedia pages rank in a random set of Google searches. Here were the results on August 10, 2006: — World War II: #1 — Israel: #1

Encouraging people to contribute knowledge — The web contains an enormous amount of information, and Google has helped to make that information more easily accessible by providing pretty good search facilities. But not everything is written nor is everything well organized to make it easily discoverable.

The skills you need to succeed — One of the most important changes of the last 30 years is that digital technology has transformed almost everyone into an information worker. — In almost every job now, people use software and work with information to enable their organisation to operate more effectively.

The Promise of Social Network Advertising — How much can social networks net? — Social networking is an Internet success story. — This year, 37% of the US adult Internet population used online social networking at least once a month. That figure will rise to 49% in 2011.

How to create custom ringtones in GarageBand 4.1.1 — With GarageBand 4.1.1 you can export your original song, your original audio recordings, or use Apple Loops and iLife jingles to create a custom ringtone for your iPhone. — Here's what you need to do it: — GarageBand 4.1.1 or later

The Fact And Fiction Of Sam Sethi — So Sam Sethi, former TechCrunch UK editor, announced the closing of his Blognation blog network today. Hey lays 100% of the blame for the failure on me personally. And while I agree with Mathew Ingram, Techfold and others that it isn't appropriate to lay blame on others for your own failure.

Greedy Webkinz Infuriates Parents, Trashes Own Brand — One of the greatest online success stories of the past two years, Webkinz, has suddenly threatened its brand and annoyed its most important constituency (parents) by bombarding kids with ads. — The Webkinz model was simple and brilliant …

Microsoft strikes back at Opera antitrust claims — Microsoft on Friday denied antitrust claims by Opera Software that the software giant is abusing its dominant market position to lock users into the Internet Explorer Web browser. — Opera, based in Norway, announced on Thursday …

Officially unlocked iPhones not really unlocked — It turns out that the officially (Apple-sanctioned) unlocked iPhone you bought for 649 Euros (about US$965) from Orange in France — which, according to some reports, accounts for up to 20% of total iPhone sales in France — is not really unlocked.